The Raven’s Nocturne

By Al Konda

A raven called, as if to name the night,

And darkness rang like glass, cracked yet still clear;

The infant moon, a thin light,

Looked back at him and drew the distance near.

He set his heel where vanished footfalls dwell,

And heard tomorrow breathing in a shell.

The forest kept its counsel, old and stern,

With hush stitched into bark and buried bone;

There grief and glory braided root and fern,

And every leaf remembered it was stone.

What once was shouted softened into loam,

Yet did not die—only changed its home.

He touched the air; it tasted like a psalm,

Not sung by throats, but by the turning spheres;

The world lay warm beneath a patient palm,

And carried centuries in silent years.

He felt the pulse that under all things runs,

A river dark with constellated suns.

No altar stood, yet sacrifice was there:

A breath, a doubt, a promise not yet made;

He watched his shadow kneel upon the bare,

And heard the price that light itself has paid.

For even gods—if gods know sorrow—know

How love makes thunder humble, stone made slow.

So when the raven faded into dawn,

He did not chase the omen as before;

He let the newborn crescent carry on,

A narrow boat from shore to nameless shore.

And in that wood—where silence learns to speak—

He walked as time’s deep vessel, full yet meek.

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When night speaks, and something listens

There are nights that do not arrive to cover the world—

but to reveal it.

Not in light.

But in tone.

In the subtle register where things are no longer seen
as they are during the day.

The raven does not call to frighten.

It calls to name.

And when it does, something in us recognizes the sound.

Not as omen.

But as memory.

This poem walks through that space—

where forest, time, and silence begin to speak in the same voice.

Where the past is not gone, but transformed.

Where grief and glory no longer oppose each other,
but root themselves into the same ground.

And where the human figure, standing at the center of it all,
does not conquer, does not flee—

but listens.

There is no altar here.

No ritual as we know it.

And yet, everything carries the shape of sacrifice.

Because to hear clearly
is already to give something up.

The world in this poem is not broken.

It is not healed either.

It is aware.

And in that awareness, something changes:

The need to chase meaning disappears.

The need to interpret signs dissolves.

What remains is presence.

And a quiet acceptance that:

not everything that speaks
needs to be answered.

🎬 Watch it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/m2k7ADs6iIw

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© Al Konda · The Poetry Elite